Olivier Adam with his new book, Nothing ever happens hereinnovates by writing this time a thriller, a dark novel “chilling”. But once again, as in all his previous books, it is a way of taking us into this peripheral France that contemporary French literature rarely treats, this time in a small village near Annecy and its lake.
We meet people who often grew up on the margins of commercial and consumerist society but who resist, who have tenderness as their banner. As the title of the novel says, life there seems to be monotonous. At the Café des sports, we discuss “yellow vests”, we castigate an increasingly unequal society, we see that the “social gains” no longer have anything acquired.
Until the day, when Fanny’s corpse is discovered, at the bottom of the rocks, near the lake. Fanny, the most beautiful, the one all men fall in love with. It was murder, her throat was slit before being thrown downstairs.
“Beneath the roses” by Olivier Adam (2022)
Who committed this murder? The suspense keeps the reader in suspense until the last page.
The different protagonists each speak in turn. Their intersecting stories form the portrait of a community. Each one recounts a moment of life, with its fears, its joys, its failures, its jealousies, they all have the same intermittents of the heart, the same vain desires to be recognized, to be loved, to survive, to find a corner of happiness.
gullThat’s when I realized maybe I was really in trouble.
The ideal culprit
At the center of the novel, there is Antoine, this soon-to-be forty-year-old with the air of an eternal adolescent, who appears as the ideal culprit. He was the last to be seen with the victim on the evening of the crime. Antoine and Fanny have always known a love made of ups and downs, with constant tenderness. Two little birds that hug each other when they need it. Antoine says it: “Fanny and I have gone back to being what we always were between two periods when we slept together: good comrades who are a little down in the dumps, who threaten to drag each other down if they get too attached. ‘to each other’. A couple reminiscent of the one sung by Brel: “We were two friends and Fanette loved me. If they remember, the waves will tell you how many songs I sang for Fanette. ”
Antoine is unstable, given to alcohol, subscribed to crappy little jobs. He only found a room in the attic of his father’s house. His raw sensitivity finds its origin in the death of his little sister Chloé, drowned in the lake, before the helpless eyes of Antoine.
“Wasted sentence” by Olivier Adam (2014)
The murder brings out dark areas beneath the apparent calm of the village: the managers of the Proxy where Fanny worked are not clear; a sushi vendor clings too closely to Fanny when she dances at the Café des sports; Benoît, Antoine’s brother, flaunts his success too much; Claire, Antoine’s sister, manages the local hotel and can no longer stand customers who post vicious comments on the Internet. The police officers leading the investigation are local and know everyone.
Olivier Adam chooses to invent a language that is a little different each time, a little slang, depending on each speaker.
If nothing apparently ever happens near Lake Annecy, Olivier Adam shows that beneath the calm surface, the waters can be very murky, where the violence of men and their silences lurk.
⇒ Nothing ever happens here | Dark novel | Olivier Adam | Flammarion, 362 pp., €22 digital €15
EXTRACT
“I look at her straight in the eye and I feel like she’s capable of throwing everything away. To send his whole life spinning. For a moment I find myself dreaming about her doing it with me, and immediately I feel guilty. I blame myself for thinking about that. Going with my sister-in-law. Leave the lake, the village, the hotel, the restaurant. Leaving the Terrier clan, the money we owe to Benoît, the father’s gaze, Elise’s decay, Antoine’s bullshit. Leave Claire and her illusions.”
